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ONTAP 7-Mode Transition

Considerations for deduplication and compression

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When using compression, the source and the destination volumes must belong to a 64-bit aggregate. All compression and deduplication savings on the source volume are retained over the network during transition. After transition, the destination volume inherits all of the compression and deduplication attributes and storage savings from the source volume.

Transitioning deduplicated and compressed data helps in reducing the network bandwidth during transition because of the following reasons:

  • Shared blocks are transferred only once.

  • Compression is maintained throughout the transfer.

  • Compressed and deduplicated data involves smaller transfer sizes as a result of compression and deduplication space savings; therefore, the transfers are completed more quickly.

You should not start compression or deduplication of existing data on the source volume during transition. If deduplication or compression is in progress, you should start the transition only after the deduplication or compression operation is complete. Therefore, undeduplicated or uncompressed data and additional temporary metadata files are not sent over the network to the destination volume.

For deduplication and compression to take effect on any new data written on the ONTAP volume, you must enable deduplication and compression schedules after the transition.

Beginning with Data ONTAP 8.1, deduplication maintains a partially ordered fingerprint database in the volume along with the aggregate copy. As a result, the destination system will have the space savings from the source volume as well as a copy of the ordered fingerprint database. After migration, when volume efficiency is run on the new volume for the first time, the aggregate fingerprint database is automatically constructed from the copy in the destination volume. This can result in a one-time increase in the time it takes for volume efficiency operations to complete.

If your source volume is running a Data ONTAP operating in 7-Mode prior to 8.1, you must run the volume efficiency start command with the -scan-old-data option parameter to optimize space savings. After the migration is complete, you should verify whether the deduplication schedule meets your requirements on your cluster and consider switching to a volume efficiency policy.